Sandy slammed doors on an era, but South Amboy finds renewal in store

SOUTH AMBOY — The hum of generators powering shiny white refrigerator cases greets visitors to the new supermarket on Bordentown Avenue in South Amboy. The laminated wood floor still smells of varnish, and pristine boxes of Ronzoni, bottles of Arizona tea and packages of Keebler cookies loom over the space in front of the registers.

Two-hundred-and-twenty-seven days after the family owned Foodtown closed its doors because of Hurricane Sandy, a family owned Key Food will open in the same spot today at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 10 a.m.

And when it does, the Polish-American former owner will be on hand to buy the first item — a candy bar — from the new Arab-American owner. Two men whose families have been in the grocery business for more than 150 years, combined.

Last year, when 74-year-old Ed Paczkowski was forced to sell the business started by his father in 1928 as Frank’s Meat Market, such continuity seemed unlikely. Foodtown was struggling financially when Sandy hit.

A loss of power for 11 days pushed the only supermarket in South Amboy over the edge.

“The storm determined our destiny. It did us in,” said Nancy Orlowski, the Foodtown’s former assistant manager. “But it turned out to be an opportunity for Ed to make a decision about the business.”

The decision was to sell, to Nasser Nasser, 43, who owns a Key Food in Staten Island and more than a dozen 7-Eleven stores in New Jersey.

Nasser Nasser is opening Key Foods grocery store in the old Foodtown in South Amboy. The former Foodtown closed because of a lack of electricity after Sandy. New owners found this sign on display from the previous store.Ed Murray/The Star-Ledger

“The community needed another store here,” said Nasser. In 1970 his father, Mustafa, brought his family to New Jersey from the Mideast and opened the former M&N supermarket in Paterson. Eventually there were family owned stores in New Rochelle and Mount Vernon as well. Like Paczkowski, who first worked at his father’s grocery store when he was 12 weighing potatoes, Nasser stocked shelves at the M&N when he was 14. Two of his brothers now run the Key Food store in Staten Island.

“My father loved the supermarket business, so I’m trying to stay in his footsteps,” Nasser said.

He’s also trying to stay true to Foodtown’s past. Seventy percent of the store’s former employees have been rehired, including Orlowski, who first met Nasser in the store’s parking lot where she tried to hand him her résumé and he refused to take it.

“He said, ‘I don’t need that’ and waved it away,” Orlowski explained. “He said he’d call me the day before he needed me.”

When he did, she told Nasser she “wanted to do for him what (she) did for Ed, and nothing less.” They talked for fewer than five minutes, according to Orlowski. She was hired.

Two of Paczkowski’s sons, Frank and Ed Jr. will also be returning. “It’s still hard,” Ed Jr. said about Foodtown’s closing after Sandy. “It was all ours. You have to learn to let go. But it gets easier.”

It helps that Frank will be returning as the manager of the meat department, 80 percent of which will be run by former meat department employees.

“They’re butchers,” Nasser said. “This was (originally) Frank’s Meat Market, and it was important to Ed that this store have the same quality of meat.”

The small-town, neighborhood feel is a hallmark of Key Food Stores Co-operative, which was founded in 1937 in Brooklyn and over the years has expanded to all five New York City boroughs, Long Island, upstate New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. All Key Food stores are individually owned and operated, according to its website.

At the South Amboy Key Food, Nasser says he will be using the same distributors and buyers as Paczkowski’s Foodtown and will continue Foodtown’s home delivery service, too. The liquor store attached to the former Foodtown is also reopening for business.

“Before it’s my store, it’s the community’s store,” Nasser said.

Framed fliers from Foodtown’s past and a wooden wallhanging of Frank’s Meat Market remain. So do several of the trophies won by Foodtown personnel for their creative floats in various town parades. Even Paczkowski’s old Rolodex can be found on Nasser’s new desk.

“I told him I wanted him to be a part of the store,” Nasser said of Paczkowski, from whom he leases the building. “He’s really proud of what we’ve done here.”

During the store’s eight months of renovations, Paczkowski was a frequent presence, and when questions arise or advice is needed, he’s always just a phone call away. On Wednesday, Nasser dialed the old owner.

“Eddie! Where are you?”

Turns out, Paczkowski was in the parking lot. He’d just pulled up. Five minutes later, he was in the new boss’s office.

Paczkowski is wistful about having to sell the business, but is pleased with what he sees so far.

“We could have never remodeled the store the way he did.”

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Nasser spent $3 million, he said, on renovations and new equipment, including energysaving LED lighting inside and new paint and signs (for “more curb appeal”) outside. There is also a new roof, new ceiling and new floors.

The produce aisle was widened, the dairy section has been expanded from 60 feet to 90, frozen foods from 30 feet to 45, and the deli counter will offer prepared meals and more hot food.

Paczkowski and Orlowski, the former assistant manager, are also eager to see the massive new ice machine up and running. The machine not only makes its own ice, Orlowski said, but bags it, too.

With two days still to go, the store was busy making final preparations, A delivery man from Utz needed a signature before he began unloading chips and snacks.

In the “Cheeses of the World” section, a utility worker on a lift adjusted a ceiling tile. The check-out counters buzzed and beeped as a gaggle of new employees trained on the registers.

Orlowski was also busy, asking one visitor who appeared to be walking around aimlessly who he was. When he identified himself as a manager from a nearby ShopRite, she politely escorted him out.

Paczkowski plans on being the first customer today when the store officially opens, and he plans on buying his favorite candy bar, a “Payday.”

“I have the last customer’s dollar with the name on it, Jennifer Gay, and the first dollar from 1928 with the name Mrs. Campion.

South Amboy has had to wait nearly nine months to get its only supermarket back, and residents have anxiously watched the progress of the renovations.

When two women in blue surgical scrubs walked up to take a peek inside, they said they were just there to say “hi” to some of the former employees of the store. The women, nurses at the surgery center across the street, said they were regular customers of the old Foodtown.

“We’re very excited (about the opening),” said Shannon Driskill, 43, of Old Bridge. “We come here for lunch and pick up groceries after work. It’s good to see them all get back to work. We rely on this store so much.”